


Just Another Hero

by AstroGirl



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, PTSD, Post-Canon, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 12:26:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6657673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max's story precedes him. Or some version of it does, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Another Hero

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Trope Bingo for prompt "tall tales." Contains spoilers for all four moves. (And also some lies about them.)

White tents in the desert. Camels. Utilitarian vehicles, more armored than armed. 

Nomads. Don't-try-to-kill-us-and-we-won't-kill-you types. Probably. Willing to trade, probably. Looks like he's found today's strategy for living.

Max lowers the binocs, ducks back behind the dune where he's hidden his ride, and starts filling his pack with what he can spare. There's not much. Ammo, mostly. Haven't been any animals to shoot lately, and the people he's had to kill have had enough on them to replace what they cost him.

He leaves the car where it is and walks in, across the desert. Less threatening that way. Less to lose if things go bad. Even if it does make him itchy to let his means of escape this far out of his sight.

Guards meet him at the edge of the camp. Two big, battle-scarred men who move like they know exactly how fast they can take him down if he makes a wrong move and one jumpy, excited-looking youngster Max keeps a special eye on. They look well-fed. A good sign.

"Not here for trouble," Max says, standing with his arms held carefully out at his sides.

"No weapons in the camp," says the taller, thicker guard. Max nods and makes himself stand still as the other big one frisks him. The youngster, looking like he hopes Max will try something, waves a pistol back and forth in front of him. The hilt is painted with what might be drops and splatters of blood, a kid's idea of what's intimidating. He keeps it on Max even when the frisking's done, until the man next to him rolls his eyes and slaps his arm down. 

They pile all of his weapons – all the ones they've found – in a heap and leave them there. Out in the open, where he can see they haven't disappeared. The stuff in his pack, they leave where it is. Civilized people.

Other nomads are coming out of the tents now. Gathering around him. Staring. He's used to it, as much as he's used to people at all, but he doesn't like it. Crowds always put him on edge.

He tries to ignore most of them, focuses on the man who, by the way he stands, looks like the leader. (Only by the way he stands, though. No warlord armor. No jewelry made of bullets and the bones of enemies. Makes a nice change.) 

The crowd parts for Max as he steps forward, leaving him face-to-face with the man. "You make trades?" he says.

The man looks him up and down like he thinks he can tell anything about anyone that way. His eyes are bright, sharp blue in his sun-baked face. "Depends what it is."

Max says, "Got bullets. Need food." 

The man nods, and Max opens his pack, pulls out a box, a bandolier.

"That all? Pack looks fuller than that."

Max drops what he's holding onto the sand, takes out the shotgun shells. Under those, in case the bullets aren't wanted, he's got spark plugs, a fan belt, tools. Hopes he won't need to part with those. It's better to have spares. "Meat, if you've got it," he says. His stomach tries to rumble and gives up, hopefully before the man can hear. "A week's worth." Some places, this much ammo might be worth that. Some places it won't.

Seems like here, it is. The leader snaps his fingers, points towards a tent, and a scarred, wiry child breaks away from the crowd, ducks into the tent, returns with a small sack of dried meat for him. Unidentified meat, but sometimes it's better not to ask, so Max doesn't. Doesn't care much, anyway. He tears at a strip with his teeth, trying not to look as hungry as he is. Resisting the urge to swallow too much all at once and surprise his shriveled stomach with more than it can handle.

"Thanks," he says and turns to go, but the leader stops him with a hand on his arm. Max twitches, but doesn't pull a hidden knife and slit his throat.

Can't leave yet, they tell him, in too many overlapping voices. Policy. They camp in the day, travel in the cool and the cover of night. Nobody leaves till dusk. Strangers don't run off to maybe tell their friends where nomads are resting with their food and their water and their women. Precaution. "If we're going to meet trouble," the leader tells him, his hand tightening on Max's arm, the grip right on the border between friendly and not, "we're gonna meet it on the road."

The guards stand between him and his guns, the big ones quiet and ready, the little one squinting at him menacingly. If it were life-or-death, he'd chance it, but... He glances at the sun where it sits in the middle of a long afternoon, considers it a moment, then shrugs, pulls out another piece of meat, and chews.

The leader's grip tightens again, relaxes, releases. He smiles at Max, a now-we're-all-good-friends smile. Max doesn't smile back.

"Come and sit, then" the man says, raising his voice so it carries through the camp. "Tell us what news you have!"

"No news," says Max. Only a fool expects anything important to change. But he knows what they really want to hear: who's on the move, who's seizing power from who, who's marauding through the wastes between here and the Salt. Places to trade, places to avoid. But Max hasn't seen people in... He shakes his head, lifts up his bag of meat a little. "If I had anything useful to tell, I'd have charged more."

The leader laughs and claps him on the back like he's just made a joke. He almost manages not to twitch, this time. "Sit down, then, and _we'll_ talk. Since you seem to've lost the habit."

They sit, a few dozen nomads in ragged robes and leathers, on torn and faded blankets in the sand. A young woman with a headband made of plastic scraps spreads one for Max, and he acknowledges her with a nod, his gaze sliding away from her and off across the desert.

In front of them, grubby children with bits of metal and old electronics braided in their hair scuffle and shove for a place at the leader's feet. "Tell us a story, Uncle!" one of them calls out, bumping a younger boy aside for space on a blanket.

"Yes," says another. "Tell us about the Madman of the Bush again!"

"All right, all right." The leader looks at Max. "You heard these stories, stranger? About the Madman, the nameless hero of the outback?"

Max drags his eyes back from the desert and looks around him. "You got any water?"

The leader makes a gesture, and someone passes him a water skin. The water inside is warm and tastes of leather. Max savors its wetness in his mouth a moment before he swallows.

"Guess that's a no," the man says. "Well, then." He settles himself down, and the chatter from the gathered crowd hushes instantly. Even the guards look attentive. The young one takes his eyes off Max for the first time since he arrived, leaning forward as if hungry for his leader's words.

Max takes another swig of water and thinks about which direction to head come sundown.

"He wasn't always a mad wanderer," the man begins. "That's how the story goes. Back in the Good Old Days, before the bombs and the dry and the death, back when the roads ran smooth and the guzzline flowed as plentiful as blood, they say he was something else entirely. They say he was a Road Warrior."

Max's head snaps up, and for a moment he almost lets precious water escape down his chin. He hasn't heard that phrase in a long time. Hasn't deliberately let himself think of the past it came from in a long time, either. Too often, it flashes across his mind when he doesn't want it to. The rest of the time, it might as well be a story. Or a dream.

He pushes these thoughts aside, and focuses on the man, instead, on his leathery skin and bleached-white hair and mostly tumor-free face. Looks old enough to remember those days. Might not be. It can be hard to tell; everyone looks either too young or too old now. 

"In those days," the speaker continues, "there was Law. Not laws any bloke with a gun and a territory can make for himself, like now. One Law, that protected both the powerful _and_ the poor. And this not-yet-mad Madman, he was a fighter for the Law."

"Tell us!" cries the scarred child breathlessly. His scars are old knife-gashes, down the left side of his face. "Tell us how people who killed, an' people who stole, and people who... who _anything_ , they got the Road Warrior after 'em!"

"That's right. The warlords and the gangs and the raiders and the knife-boys, everyone who'd hurt folks just goin' about the business of trying to live, he'd ride 'em down!" The man's voice rises to a gleeful croak. "Ride 'em down in the fastest, baddest, meanest car the old world ever made, and set 'em all on fire!"

Max grips the waterskin tight, and forgets to take another drink. This is not a good story for kids, he thinks. Even now. Maybe especially now.

"But they didn't like that, did they, Uncle?" says the young woman who gave him the water. She's caught up in the story. Eager. Playing her part.

"Indeed they did not!" Uncle says. "And the worst of them, the kin to them that killed the world, they got themselves together in their wildest rigs, and they _came_ for him!" Uncle pauses dramatically, and everyone falls silent again. The young guard licks his lips, as if eager to taste blood.

And Uncle continues, spinning a story that's half ridiculous invention, half... familiar. As familiar as the memories that flicker in the corners of his mind, the voices he hears calling him in the silence of the desert.

Uncle describes explosions, fires, body parts strewn along a highway. A chase through city and country. Dead enemies. Dead friends. A dead woman. A dead child. 

He makes hand gestures, illustrating it all. Cutthroat lines across his neck.

Max finds his muscles tensing, his body rising halfway to a crouch. He can't see. Or, he can see, but all he can see are faces and blood. He lifts his face upwards, stares as close as he can to the sun until the visions burn away.

When he's blinked and squinted himself back into the present, a gentle hand touches his shoulder, settles him back down onto the blanket. The woman with the water. She raises the skin to his lips for another drink, and smiles at him for a moment before turning back towards the storyteller. No one else pays any attention. These things happen.

He's missed some of the story. He's not sorry about that.

"--comes out of the wastes to deal out justice," says the storyteller. "You kiddies remember, I told you about justice? That's part of what the Law was about. Makin' sure them that hurt others got what was comin' to 'em."

Max wipes a trickle of sweat from his forehead, tries to rub the ache behind it away. "Justice" is a word he hasn't thought about since the world ended. It's not one he wants to think about now.

"They say," the man continues, "that he saved the last free petrol farmers in the world. Fought their attackers in heated battle, called miracles from out of the air, and sacrificed himself so they could all escape! Do you want to hear that story true?"

They do. The children hoot and call for it, bouncing on their blankets. The young guard pumps his fist with excitement.

Uncle makes quite a story of this, too. No room for desperation, for the stupidity of finding yourself an unwilling decoy. It's the story of a knight from one of the old world's fairy tales, come to defend the innocent. Come to rip the baddies to shreds, and burn them to ash. "Law and Order," Uncle calls it, and his audience eats it up, as if they think they know what those words mean.

In the storyteller's vision, motorcycles explode in balls of fire, a gyrocopter rains destruction from the sky, invaders beg for mercy and are granted death, and a triumphant hero walks off into the sunrise.

And Max thinks, only: wasn't there a child? He can almost remember. A boy. He didn't die, did he? Max tries to conjure up his face, but it never comes clear. He didn't die. Max is almost sure.

"And then," the man says, "there was the time he bested Aunty Entity and a hundred of her best warriors in the Thunderdome, and led all the Lost Children to Tomorrow-morrowland."

It's a ridiculous story, even the parts that are true. But the teller does not dwell on the moments Max remembers best: The children who kept wanting to go off to die, no matter how he tried to protect them. The way he threw a fight when he looked into the eyes of the man he was about to kill and realized he was still a child, too.

He sits, and keeps his face still, and watches the sun crawl towards the horizon. He doesn't need to tell these people the truth. The truth is none of their damn business, even if they wanted it.

"And, of course," says Uncle, when the hero of his story has killed a hundred men and fulfilled a prophecy and wandered back into the desert to find someone else to save, "it was he who slew the Immortan! Stole the Immortan's wives, and then came back for him, killed him slow and awful as he deserved. Stormed his impregnable citadel, slaughtered his war boys, and released floods of pure, clean water all across the land!" He makes a sweeping gesture with his hands, his voice pitched high. "You want to hear that one, too?" They pound their feet and fists, cry out for it. Screaming.

"Furiosa." The name actually escapes his lips, but no one pays any attention. It was _Furiosa_ who killed Immortan Joe. And he has no trouble remembering _her_ face, grease-smeared and hard. Someone told him once – a few years ago? longer? – that she was still there in the Citadel. That she'd made her own green place there. He hopes it's true. Truer than the stories they're telling about him.

He tries not to listen to this one. It makes no sense, the way this man insists on telling it.

Instead, he concentrates on drinking water. Must be drinking enough: he's sweating in the heat of the afternoon. It trickles down his back, across the old marks of his tattoos. For the first time in longer than he can remember, he thinks of them as something other than a place that itches with sweat on days like this. He wonders what they say. He only ever looked at them in a mirror once, and all he remembers is "Universal Donor."

Uncle doesn't make them part of the story at all.

"And that is the tale," the storyteller concludes, after what may be more talking than Max has done in his life. "I have told it to you as I remember it told to me, as it must be told forever. Amen!"

Max shakes his head. The nomads on either side of him, released from their leader's spell, look at him curiously. He glances at the sky, where the sun is finally touching the horizon. Time to go. He stands.

"Look at you," says Uncle rising and coming to him. "All in a hurry to leave. You didn't enjoy the story?"

"Weapons," says Max, and, with an assenting gesture from the leader, the young guard brings them to him, watches carefully as he checks each one and settles each in its place. The boy's eyes are shining.

Uncle smiles. There's something calculating in his eyes, something knowing. "You don't believe in heroes, do you?"

Max squints at the sunset, at the gathering shadows of the desert. For a moment, he imagines he can see them out there, all the people he's known since the end. The killers, the victims, the people like him who don't want to be either and keep being both. Warlords ready to burn what's left of the world. And, standing behind them, Furiosa, who only wanted to save a few women from the fire after she'd helped to keep it lit. 

And the kids. Always the kids, who are never going to know any better than this.

"Not that kind," he says at last. He shoulders his sack and limps away.


End file.
